Are today’s young people spoiled, over-praised, mollycoddled? Do we punish our kids less and less while praising them more and more? Do they therefore grow up to be spineless, soft and ill-prepared for the stresses of adult life?

Nah.

So says author Alfie Kohn in a new book, “The Myth of the Spoiled Child” (Da Capo Books), which promises to use empirical evidence — science! — to disprove what is obvious to everyone except Alfie Kohn.

An especially devastating revelation of the agenda behind the thinking of Alfie Kohn comes to us from Alfie Kohn. It’s on page two.

Kohn, a progressive afflicted by a degree of squishiness one ordinarily associates only with fictional cartoon characters who don’t require a bone structure to stand upright, reveals at the outset that he is hurt by how often his fellow liberals sound, when it comes to their children, like “conservatives.” He derides habits such as, say, minimal discipline, as “hard-line,” “puritanical” or, if you like, characteristic of “Fox News hosts,” which I guess is the worst insult a liberal can hurl at another liberal.

The Myth of the Spoiled Child by Alfie Kohn

And Alfie Kohn says that “even if kids were as self-centered and spoiled as we’re told they are,” the solution is “helping them work for social change.” (The solution to liberalism is always more liberalism.)

Showing admirable courage but not a lot of wisdom, Alfie Kohn takes on the august Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield over the question of grade inflation, which Kohn implies is not actually happening today because he found a complaint about it from 1894. Har, har, except: That proves nothing.

Here are a few facts, dragged into the light by Mansfield, of which Alfie Kohn pretends to be (or, worse, actually is) unaware: The median grade at Harvard College today is an A-. The most commonly awarded grade is a straight A. As of 2001, 91% of Harvard students were graduating with honors, prompting the college to cap honors awards to 60%. Great: Only three out of five students now make the all-star team.

So it goes nationwide, especially in private schools. Median GPAs at four-year colleges and universities rose from 2.52 in the 1950s to 3.11 in 2006, according to an extensive study by Stuart Rojstaczer, formerly of Duke University. A chart he produced with colleague Christopher Healy with historical data from 1940 onward shows the percentage of As skyrocketing while Cs fall from 35% to 15% and Ds from about 12% to less than 5%.

But we all knew all that without checking. It takes self-delusion on an Alfie Kohn scale to deny it, and the author shows his hand again when he huffs, “Denunciations of grade inflation deflect our attention from the harm done by grading itself” and “outrage over participation trophies means we’re much less likely to explore the broader effects of competition.”

The most commonly awarded grade is a straight A.

A world without competition, judgment, scores? In which we pretend everybody is equal because it’s gentler on the losers? Groovy, man. While we’re at it, let’s all live on a commune where we grow our own bean curd and hemp and await the inevitable moment when capitalism finally devours itself.

There are many more Alfie Kohn-isms in Alfie Kohn’s book: When a woman tells him she uses a software tool to shut off her teen daughter’s cellphone at a certain hour so the kid is forced to make time for things other than texting, he goes woozy with sympathy for the victimized kid and compares the mom to “a dictator.”

Alfie Kohn refers to time-outs for toddlers as “insidious,” defends bans on dodgeball, bizarrely dismisses the fact that rewards motivate people as “an antiquated version of psychology constructed largely on experiments with lab animals” and says class rankings for students “adds the arsenic of competition to the strychnine of extrinsic motivation.” Since arsenic and strychnine are deadly poisons, I guess that means everyone who was ever ranked in any way is dead. Maybe in Alfie Kohn’s next book he’ll reveal the locations of the mass graves outside high schools. Under the soccer fields?

In his much-applauded commencement speech to the Class of 2012, English teacher David McCullough Jr. said that his Wellesley High School, frequently called “one of the best,” is “where a B is the new C, and the midlevel curriculum is called Advanced College Placement.

“And I hope you caught me when I said ‘one of the best.’ I said ‘one of the best’ so we can feel better about ourselves. . . . But the phrase defies logic. By definition there can be only one best. You’re it or you’re not.”

Except in the world according to Alfie Kohn, where everybody can be — must be! — the best. The proof is that it says so on the trophy they got for showing up.